The elusive question is “How much swap space do I need to configure?” remains. as always the answer is “It depends” We have looked at why and how swap space is used and configure. I hope we have shed some light on the elsuive dark art or a virtual memory.

If your system is using swap space, the problem is simple; it has breached, at least the lotsfree threshold and vhand as paged-out part of, at least one process.

This is a classic symptom of a memory bottleneck. If the situation persists, you may see a significant increase in system-level processing (vhand executing) as well as a significant increase in system-level IO (vhand posting data pages to the swap area).

I was once asked how to tune a system for best swap space utilization. My answer was simple: Buy more memory or crea secondary swap area space.